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Compartmentalized Pasts: Workers’ History in Socialist Yugoslavia

Paper presented at the 2016 European Social Science History Conference, Valencia 30 March – 2 April 2016

Introduction

In December 1960, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Croatia decided about the director of the newly founded “Institute for the History of the Workers’ Movement” in Zagreb. Their pick was a major-general from the Yugoslav People’s Army. He did not have training as a historian but only secondary and vocational school education. However, he possessed other important qualifications: he had been a partisan during World War Two, he was an active member of the Communists Party and of the influential partisan veteran organization, and he was a history enthusiast. He had already published on themes from the military and political history of Yugoslavia, and he was a member of the editorial board of the “Military Encyclopedia” (Vojna Enciklopedija).

Yet despite his political credentials, he proved to be an obstinate director not easily controlled by the party’s Central Committee: he attempted to liberate the institute from direct political guidance. Under his leadership, the institute intervened – by historiographic means – in the ongoing debates in Yugoslavia about the constitutional framework in which he firmly sided with those who argued for further decentralization and opposed centralism (which they saw as a Serbian plot). The institute, for example, subjected to heavy critique the 1963 draft version of the official “Overview of the History of the Union of Communists of Yugoslavia”. It was said to not properly address the peculiarities of the history of the individual peoples of Yugoslavia.

The Institute’s director, in general, also published works which challenged solidified official views about World War Two, for example on the number of war casualties. These were, of course, extremely sensible topics where party stalwarts accepted little deviation from the party orthodoxy. It did not take long for high party organs accusing the director of Croatian nationalism. One member of the Croatian Central Committee even accused him of chauvinism. Due to this pressure, in April 1967 he finally stepped down from his position as director of the Institute for the History of the Workers’ Movement, which in the meantime had added “of Croatia” to its name.[1] An account of the Institute’s early years published in 1982, at a time when Croatia still experienced a period of “silence” after the purge of the party liberals in 1971, stressed that due to its director, the Institute had become “the focal point of Croatian nationalism in historiography.”[2]

The director’s scholarly work, as obscure as it is, is not widely known (his dissertation treated the “Reasons for the Crisis of the Monarcho-Fascist Yugoslavia”)[3] but he nevertheless is a household name not only in Croatia, but also abroad: the person in question is Franjo Tudjman, which in 1990 became the first non-communist head of state of Croatia and led the country to independence and into war.

This essay highlights the paradoxes of labor history in socialist Yugoslavia. Labor history, in the form of workers’ history, was on the one hand a well institutionalized field with a number of specialized research centers. On the other hand, it suffered from the same contextual constraints in Yugoslavia like the discipline of history at large: first, although being relatively liberal, Yugoslavia was a one-party communist autocracy with clear provisions by the ruling party as for the interpretation of contemporary history. Second, history writing regularly was part in the never-ending tensions between the de-centralizing and the centralizing forces in Yugoslav politics, a balance which tilted ever more towards de-centralization. Hence a project that had started out to write the historical justification of Yugoslavia’s basic mantra of “Brotherhood and Unity” turned into distinct national histories of the recent past. I will argue that the “nationalization” of labor history was not the result of any innate nationalism of the historians but rather the natural outcome of the institutional structure of the discipline. Institutionalization of workers’ history, thus, proved to be a mixed blessing. It did not really facilitate scholarly creativity and independence. This is one of the main reasons why, in view of the substantial number of scholars and publications, Yugoslav workers’ history produced relatively little which today would be of value to uncover the history of labor in this area.

The institutional set-up

Similar to other communist regimes, the Yugoslav one took history very seriously. Yet the communist government was soon forced to recognize that established historians at the country’s universities and academies of sciences were not very keen on writing the history of the party and of the heroic partisan struggle.[4] So the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia decided in January 1949 that at each Central Committee of the party in the constitutive republics, a history division should be established. The Central Committee in Belgrade on the federal level had established a history division already in 1948, which in 1952 was transformed into the “Historical Archive” of the Central Committee.[5] Also in the republics, the new history commissions were soon reorganized into historical archives of the Central Committee in each republic. They were assigned to collect documents on the history of the Party and of working class organizations as well as of memoires of participants in the People’s Liberation War. These activities produced the first tangible results, as documents were collected and prepared for preservation that otherwise would likely have been lost. In Croatia as well as in Serbia, the historical documentation compiled by the party history archives is nowadays researchable in the national archives; in Slovenia, it is still kept at the Institute for Contemporary History, the ultimate successor of the Slovenian Central Committee’s historical archive. These archives contain a lot of useful documents that can be used for research on occupation and resistance during WWII, on the labor movement and its struggles in the interwar period, on political repression as well as on the fates of individual activists and partisans (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Screenshot of the description of the Archive of the Institute for the History of the Workers’ Movement of Croatia (1956-1995) in the Croatian State Archive, Zagreb[6]

By the end of the 1950s, the archives were separated from the Central Committees and turned into independent cultural-scientific institutions. Few years later they were renamed into institutes for the history of the workers’ movement. An important impulse for this development was the 1961 decision of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia to produce a multi-volume history of the party. The institutes in the republics were commissioned to work on the parts pertaining to the history of their republic, while the Belgrade based Institute for the History of the Workers’ Movement of Yugoslavia would coordinate the effort. By the mid-1960s, four Institutes for the History of the Workers’ Movement existed in the republics: in Ljubljana, in Belgrade, in Zagreb, and in Sarajevo (the institute in Sarajevo was renamed into Institute of History already in 1973).[7] In Croatia, two smaller units for the history of the workers’ movement of Istria and of Dalmatia were established in Rijeka and Dubrovnik. Only in Macedonia and Montenegro, there were no Institutes for the History of the Workers’ Movement, but rather of the general history of their republic (the Institute for National History in Skopje and the Institute of History in Titograd); in both republics, no real institutions of academic history writing had existed before 1945, so the communists hoped that establishing historiography from the scratch would guarantee a sufficiently partisan approach also in “general” history.

The envisioned collective history of the Communist Party, though was never written, since the individual institutes could not agree on a shared narrative. Workers’ history thus suffered the same fate as the general history of Yugoslavia: a grandiose multi-volume project succeeded only until the late 18th century because no agreement could be reached between the historians across the country how to treat the 19th century, let alone the 20th century.[8] The institutional structure of historiography in Yugoslavia solidified its fragmentation: few historians worked on the history of the country as a whole and even fewer on the history of another than their own republic. There was a quite understanding to avoid “foreign intervention” into the history of other peoples. This was the case also in the field of the history of the workers’ movements.[9] The Zagreb Institute’s main task, for example, was said to “scientifically illuminate the development of the revolutionary movement in Croatia” – as this existed in a vacuum.[10] How difficult it was to come up with a common narrative, because of institutional fragmentation, is clearly shown by the Serbian example: in 1977 the Party Presidency of Serbia’s League of Communists called upon the Institute for the History of the Worker’s Movement in Belgrade and the historical institutes in Prishtina (Kosovo) and Novi Sad (Vojvodina) to write a history of the “League of Communists of Serbia”. Yet, the three institutes could not agree even on the fundamentals of the party’s history, so that the project never got traction (the Belgrade institute would instead work on the party’s history in the limits of Serbia proper, i.e. without considering the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina).

The institutes for the history of the workers’ movement, despite occasional funding problems, nevertheless grew into sizeable institutions (which facilitated the self-referential tendency of their work). They had a double role to play: apart from dealing with the history of the workers’ movement, they were also the only specialized institutes for the contemporary history of their republic: they did research also on the most recent past, that is, the war and post-war years. Historians at the more established university and academy institutes tried to avoid these periods because these topics were politically so charged. They did not want to write party history, whereas the workers’ movement history institutes were commissioned to deal with the history of the ruling party. This is an important reason for their growth potential: The Institute in Zagreb, for example, employed around 90 people by 1967 and although its staff was cut in the 1970s, it remained the by far largest center for contemporary history in Croatia. The institutes also occupied an important place in the communication of historical scholarship: they edited their own book series and journals, which served mainly to present the results of their own research.

Today, the institutes still exist, though without any reference to workers in their names and with new research profiles, which they adopted in the early 1990s. The Institutes in Zagreb and Sarajevo turned into research center for all periods of Croatian and Bosnian, respectively, history (Croatian Institute for History and Institute for History in Sarajevo), while the institute in Belgrade and Ljubljana were renamed into Institutes of Contemporary History.[11]

Themes, Trends, and Voids

What were the major themes explored by these institutes? The multi-year work plan of the Institute in Zagreb from the early 1970s is indicative for the research of these institutions. It pursued four major projects on to-be-expected topics: “The History of the Workers’ Movement, the Communist Party and the Socialist Revolution in Croatia”, “The History of the Workers’ Movement in Southeastern Europe” (I am not aware of any publication coming out from this), the “History of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia” and the “History of the League of Communists of Croatia”. Each of these collaborative projects was supposed to result in a synthesis, though none of them did. Historians at the Zagreb and the other institutes generally did not stray away from the party orthodoxy (many of them were also party members). Given the repressive political climate in Yugoslav after the purges of liberals and nationalists in the early 1970s, this was not surprising.

To get a first and certainly superficial impression of the popularity of themes of the institutes’ publications I mapped the frequency of words in the titles of articles in their journals and of their books (see Figures 2 to 6).[12] These word clouds reveal not only the dominant topics but also geographic frames of reference.

A simple count of word frequencies in book and journal article titles does, of course, not amount to a discourse analysis. Nevertheless, these numbers and their graphic representation tell something about the dominant topics: first of all, the institutes took their task to elucidate the recent history of ‘their’ republics very seriously, especially in book publications. The dominant geographic frame of references was clearly Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia-Hercegovina respectively. In journal articles, the common Yugoslav framework received a bit more attention (although this is also due to the name of the party in the interwar period, i.e. “Communist Party of Yugoslavia”). Thematically, a significant number of publications deal with the partisan struggle during World War Two. The frequency of concepts such as “party”, “movement” (pokret), “socialist”, “revolution” and “union” (sindikat) points to the emphasis on workers’ organizations and their struggles, especially those that were considered part of the communist pedigree.

In comparison to these themes, labor and also workers beyond “movement” and some form of organization appear to be marginal. Workers outside of any political organization are rarely dealt with and labor as a social practice is practically absent in the canon of Yugoslav workers’ history. The five volumes of collections of essays under the title “History of the Labor Movement”, published by the Belgrade based Department of History of the Yugoslav Workers’ Movement during the eight years of its existence, featured only two contributions on the history of labor, if party history is left beside (and one of these dealt with the participation of workers in the 1920 elections).[13] True to their title, these collective volumes contained many pieces on the organized labor movement, with its typical bias towards groups that were considered part of the pre-history of the socialist revolution. Thus, the publications of the institutions for writing the history of the labor movement mainly contributed to contemporary political and party history, with a clear focus on the legitimizing needs of the ruling communists.

This thematic emphasis is also evident in the reception of foreign scholarship. The Croatian Časopis za suvremenu povijest, for example, ran a relatively comprehensive review section from its beginning. Most issues of the journal published between six and ten reviews of books and other journals. Yet from 1969 to 1989 only 16 reviews presented works by foreign scholars from the field of social and economic history.[14] Very few of them were devoted to labor history. This leads me to the suspicion that the labor (movement) historiography in Yugoslavia did not take into consideration the relevant historiographic developments in the international arena – or probably did not know about them. Even neo-Marxist western historians of workers history and of labor were largely ignored.

The publications, in their majority, are streamlined to the official views of the party on its history. Many of them are also a trying read: rich in detail, but weak in interpretation. Their goal was to describe and not so much to explain (anyway, final explanations were the party’s business). Of course, some of these books have use as sources of information but inspiring these are not. However, thanks to their keenness for facts, the institutes produced useful document editions[15] and chronologies[16].

Some of the most valuable contributions from the explorations of workers’ organizations are those on the trade unions despite although they tend to exaggerate the communist influence in labor struggles (which probably was unavoidable). The penchant of Yugoslav historians for detail sometimes led to rather thick and useful descriptions on the micro-level. The institute in Belgrade produced seven volumes on the “Trade Union Movement” in Serbia and Belgrade respectively;[17] trade unions were a popular subject in other republics as well.[18] These and other publications show restless workers in the interwar period, who during times of economic disruption regularly went on strike or organized walkouts, sometimes with success on the company level, but also faced severe government repression. It seems that these cases of industrial actions often did not involve trade union organization, although historians tried hard to highlight the role of socialist/communist unions.[19]

Innovations

A real innovation in Yugoslav historiography greatly strengthened by the institutes was their research on economic and social history, and the introduction of materialist approaches into a discipline that so far had been dominated by idealism. It should be mentioned that social and economic history also suffered from the combination of empiricism and political bias, which characterized communist historiography; neither was analysis, interpretation and comparison its strong side. Nevertheless these works extended the thematic canon of historiography, which prior to 1945 had focused almost purely on political events. New subjects and historical agents attracted scholarly attention, which otherwise would most likely have been ignored. There were, for example, noteworthy studies of individual enterprises (sometimes commissioned by them).

A small number of works provide details on the social composition of the “working class” in specific regions. These studies are probably the most useful legacy of the institutes’ research. They highlighted, for example, the rural origins of most workers, the significant wage differentials between different groups of workers, and the patterns of household consumption.[20] Mira Kolar-Dimitrijević’s research – almost a single woman effort of the social history of labor in Croatia –produced valuable insights into the professional structure of the workforce in Croatia in the interwar and pre-1914 periods.[21] She pointed to the exceptionally high rate of job-turnover as well as the low skill level of most workers who usually came from impoverished peasant families. She concluded that “the under-development of capitalism in Croatia causes the under-development of the working class” – in contrast to the over-developed bureaucratic apparatus – and that the working class remained a small part of the whole working population, given the preponderance of farming.[22] Kolar-Dimitrijević also found out that during the interwar period female industrial employment developed more dynamically than male, but that women earned significantly less than men. Such studies, implicitly, questioned the communist master narrative of a homogenous, uniform “working class” showing instead that huge variety of workers’ experiences.

The study of women’s history was another major arena of thematic innovation stimulated by the history of the workers’ movement. Not that Yugoslav history of organized labor was particularly gender-sensitive, but the institutes produced at least some works specifically dealing with the female side of that story. These studies usually focused on organizations as well and, obviously, they took the superiority of communist emancipation policies for granted. They had also a clear political agenda trying to justify women’s new position in the socialist society by pointing to their own struggles in the past. Jovanka Kecman at the Institute for Contemporary History in Belgrade, for example, published a thick and informative volume on “The Women of Yugoslavia in the Workers’ Movement and in Women’s Organizations, 1918–1941”.[23] Apart from detailed descriptions of the activities of women in labor organizations all across Yugoslavia, her book contains useful information on the participation of women in the wage economy as well as in labor protests. Her work also reveals – although the author herself is mute on that – the tension between spontaneous workers’ protests after World War One and the rigid ideology of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.[24] However, this study also suffers from the lack of a clear research problem: it offers a great chronology of events but little in term of explanation.

From the above cited works it appears that female historians at the institutes in question were more likely to produce interesting works than male ones. This might be a complete coincidence. But one could also speculate that male historians concentrated on the hard core of party history, where they could earn more prestige, while women historians turned to the soft underbelly of party history, which makes their research more relevant for today.

It is also indicative that some of the most interesting works on social history came from the periphery of the country and the discipline. I am thinking, for example, of the excellent 1962 book of Montenegrin historian Djoko Pejović on economic emigration from Montenegro in the 18th and 19th century.[25] Another historian of the Institute for History in Titograd, Ljubinka Ćirić-Bogetić, published at time an interesting history of the commons in Montenegro in the 19th and 20th century[26] – a social and economic institution that was arguably more relevant to the livelihoods of ordinary people in Montenegro than whatever ‘socialist’ organization might have existed at that time (given the lack of any industry to speak of).

Conclusion

The majority of works on the history of labor, or rather the history of the workers’ movement and its organizations, produced in Yugoslavia aimed at inscribing the diverse Yugoslav (and pre-Yugoslav) experiences into a dominant narrative of revolutionary struggles and ascending socialism. These efforts were clearly guided by the attempt to write the pre-history of communist rule and to produce historical legitimation for the particular forms of socialism Yugoslavia (that said, the latter task was a bit like shooting at a moving target because of the volatility of the ‘Yugoslav’ way). This also means that the existence of class – in and by itself – was largely presupposed as dictated by party ideology, as evident in titles like “The Economic Situation of the Working Class in Croatia and Slavonia, 1867-1914”.[27] Books like these offer a bunch of useful information but their underlying concept of class distorts the historical record so much that they must be read against the grain.

The Institutes for the History of the Workers’ Movement explored mainly the history of communist and socialist organizations as well as the trade unions. They took these organizations’ imagined industrial worker for a proper description of real labor relations. While labor movement history in Western Europe was also initially dominated by accounts of the struggles of organized labor, it soon produced its own critique which highlighted the experiences of those outside of organized labor. Yugoslav historiography also did not get a push from a history “from below”, and oral history remained more or less an anathema. The discussed institutes did, therefore, not systematically explore the many forms of marginal, precarious and hidden forms of work which were so characteristic for this late-industrializing region. While the interested reader will find many publications on communist-leaning workers’ organizations in the interwar period, about the partisan struggle and the “socialist revolution”, he or she will learn little about the inner life of factories or the life-worlds of workers and how these differed according to gender, place, and time.

Important occupational groups received scant attention: very few publications deal with agricultural workers or the unemployed, and what the existence of these groups meant for the nature of the “working class”.[28] Just one historian, Mira Kolar-Dimitrijević in Zagreb, showed consistent interest for the ubiquitous peasant-workers, a phenomenon arguable more significant in interwar Yugoslavia than unionized industry workers with a proletarian background.[29] One might speculate that such a topic was also politically sensitive given the composition of the workforce of socialist Yugoslavia. Many workers in industry still had one foot in farming which the communist party disliked and considered a sign of backwardness. The party had doubts about the socialist consciousness of peasant-workers who were deemed to be more interested in the fate of their chicken than of socialism. The politically and institutionally enforced focus on the pre-history of communist rule prevented historians from asking questions more innate to the historical tradition of their region.

The historiography on the workers’ movement mirrored Yugoslav politics also in another way: the institutions commissioned to write this history were under the responsibility of the individual republics, with the exception of the one in Belgrade which ought to deal with the labor movement of the whole of Yugoslavia. It is telling that the latter institute existed as an independent institution only for one year (1960–1961), before being joined with the Institute for the Study of the Workers’ Movement and, finally, turned into the “Institute for Contemporary History” in 1969.[30] The republican institutes clearly focused on the revolutionary tradition on the territory of their own republic. Instead of producing a joint Yugoslav narrative in the spirit of the communists’ article of faith of “brotherhood and unity”, distinct national histories of the labor movement emerged. This was not the result of foul-mindedness of historians but of the logic of a decentralized institutional structure. Funding and audiences were mainly limited to the republic, which undermined the initial attempt to write a joint Yugoslav master narrative. Even the attempts to come up with a consensual history of the Communist Party eventually failed. The way now historiography was practiced eventually contributed to legitimizing the decentralized constitutional arrangement of Yugoslavia. Slovenian historian Božo Repe once mused about the “never-existing” Yugoslav historiography[31] – the same can be said for workers’ or labor history.

In conclusion, I would draw a rather reserved balance sheet as for the development of labor history in socialist Yugoslavia. Given the amount of resources invested into this field and its firm institutional foundations, the output was underwhelming. Little of it is of real use today, other than for a meta-history of communist attempts to create a suitable past. It seems that the very institutionalization proved to be a burden: for that reason labor history remained closely aligned with the party and its legitimation strategies. Neither in terms of topics nor methods, did the Institutes for the History of the Workers’ Movement depart from conventional approaches, that is, positivism on the one hand, political partisanship on the other. Interestingly, the historians of labor developed much less of a critical approach than the sociologists, who produced excellent research on inequality and alienation in socialist Yugoslavia. It seems that in the history of the workers’ movement, historians in Yugoslavia got agitated only when they saw the history of their people misrepresented by historians of another republic. Other than that, not much exchange and debate developed, let alone a meaningful dialogue with the social sciences. Another chance missed by Yugoslavia.